]]>https://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/12/10/saturday-121011/
Sat, 10 Dec 2011 08:40:51 +0000musicclipofthedayhttps://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/12/10/saturday-121011/If sounds define a space as much as walls and windows, you don’t need to knock out a wall to open up a room—just play this.

Rara music is a Lenten processional music with strong ties to the Vodou religious tradition. It has been commonly confused with Haitian Carnival since both celebrations involve large groups of dancing revelers in the streets. Rara is performed between Ash Wednesday (the day after Carnival ends) until Easter Sunday (or Easter Monday in some parts of Haiti.) Rara bands roam the streets performing religious ceremonies as part of their ritual obligations to the “lwa” or spirits of Haitian Voodoo. Guédé, a spirit associated with death and sexuality, is an important spiritual presence in Rara celebrations and often possesses an ougan (male Voodoo priest) or mambo (female Voodoo priest) before the band begins its procession in order to bless the participants and wish them safe travels for their nightly sojourns.

With some forms of musical expression, value is tied to scarcity: the smaller the number of people who can do something, the more highly it’s prized. But with others, the opposite is true: the more readily other folks can join in, the greater the value.

]]>https://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/09/07/wednesday-9711/
Wed, 07 Sep 2011 11:02:36 +0000musicclipofthedayhttps://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/09/07/wednesday-9711/What’s surprising here isn’t that there are so many wonderful moments. Given the line-up, you’d expect that. What you wouldn’t expect is for these guys to sound so cohesive, as if they’d been playing together for years.

]]>https://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/08/22/tuesday-82311/
Tue, 23 Aug 2011 04:20:05 +0000musicclipofthedayhttps://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/08/22/tuesday-82311/From the streets of New Orleans to the parks of New York.

The Miller Theater made a mighty contribution to the daylong festival Make Music New York on Tuesday in the form of an expansive 80-minute performance of John Luther Adams’s “Inuksuit” (2009). Mr. Adams, who lives in Alaska, conceived this elastic percussion work as an outdoor piece for 9 to 99 players, and Melissa Smey, the theater’s director, went for the maximum, commandeering Morningside Park and inviting the percussion virtuoso Doug Perkins to lead a mega-ensemble that included So Percussion, the Percussion Group Cincinnati, the Proper Glue Duo, Mantra Percussion and students from music schools around the country.

Listeners walking through the park before 5 p.m. found small arrays of unattended drums, cymbals, xylophones and other instruments stationed along the park’s stairs and walkways, and conch shells, paper cones and rubber tubes scattered around the lawn where the performance was to begin. At 5, the 99 percussionists filed into the field, retrieved the smaller instruments and started the performance with gentle windlike sounds. They added graceful, eerie tones and harmonies by swinging the rubber tubes at various velocities; and they used sandpaper blocks and frame drums filled with bottle caps to create texture.

Gradually, the players dispersed through the park, making their way to the drum arrays. Your experience of the piece depended on where you were in the park, and most people walked around. (At one point I flipped a coin to choose which path to take.) But wherever you were, bursts of sound — loud, quiet, hard, soft — surrounded you.

There were sounds Mr. Adams may not have counted on. Birds and aircraft made their own contributions, as did camera shutters: at any moment, just about every player was being photographed by two or more listeners. And near the end of the piece, when the sounds were mostly the tactile ringing of xylophones and triangles, an ice cream truck added its cheerful melody to the mix (presumably not by design). But through the entire performance, I did not hear a single cellphone ring.

An odd planet, and those on it are odd, too.
They’re subject to time, but they won’t admit it.
They have their own ways of expressing protest.
They make up little pictures, like for instance this:

At first glance, nothing special.
What you see is water.
And one of its banks.
And a little boat sailing strenuously upstream.
And a bridge over the water, and people on the bridge.
It appears that the people are picking up their pace
because of the rain just beginning to lash down
from a dark cloud.

The thing is, nothing else happens.
The cloud doesn’t change its color or its shape.
The rain doesn’t increase or subside.
The boat sails on without moving.
The people on the bridge are running now
exactly where they ran before.

It’s difficult at this point to keep from commenting.
This picture is by no means innocent.
Time has been stopped here.
Its laws are no longer consulted.
It has been relieved of its influence over the course of events.
It has been ignored and insulted.

On account of a rebel,
one Hiroshige Utagawa
(a being who, by the way,
died long ago and in due course),
time has tripped and fallen down.

It might well be simply a trifling prank,
an antic on the scale of just a couple of galaxies,
let us, however, just in case,
add one final comment for the record:

For generations, it’s been considered good form here
to think highly of this picture,
to be entranced and moved.

There are those for whom even this is not enough.
They go so far as to hear the rain’s spatter,
to feel the cold drops on their necks and backs,
they look at the bridge and the people on it
as if they saw themselves there,
running the same never-to-be-finished race
through the same endless, ever-to-be-covered distance,
and they have the nerve to believe
that this is really so.

Scored for a flexible ensemble of between nine and ninety-nine percussionists, “Inuksuit” is intended for outdoor performance, and it had its première on a mountainside in Banff, Canada, in 2009. Adams at first resisted the idea of taking the piece indoors, because the interaction with nature was integral to his conception. After inspecting the Armory, though, he grasped its possibilities; the space is more a man-made canyon than a concert hall. He settled on a corps of seventy-six musicians, including five piccolo players. Arrays of drums, gongs, cymbals, bells, and numerous smaller instruments were set up on the main floor of the Drill Hall; atop catwalks on all sides; and in the hallways that connect to smaller rooms at the front of the building. In any rendition of “Inuksuit,” the performers are given four or five pages of music—the notation imitates the shapes of the Inuit markers—which they execute at their own pace. Musicians with portable instruments are instructed to move about freely. Prearranged signals prompt a move from one page to the next. The result is a composition that on the microcosmic level seems spontaneous, even chaotic, but that gathers itself into a grand, almost symphonic structure.

At 4 P.M. on a Sunday, thirteen hundred people assembled in the Drill Hall to hear the piece, variously standing, sitting, or lying on the floor. First came an awakening murmur: one group of performers exhaled through horns and cones; others rubbed stones together and made whistling sounds by whirling tubes. Then one member of the ensemble—Schick, perched above the entrance to the Drill Hall—delivered a call on a conch shell. With that commanding, shofar-like tone, the sound started to swell: tom-toms and bass drums thudded, cymbals and tam-tams crashed, sirens wailed, bells clanged. It was an engulfing, complexly layered noise, one that seemed almost to force the listeners into motion, and the crowd fanned out through the arena.

***

It is tricky to write about an event such as this. Because both ensemble and audience were in motion, no two perceptions of the performance were the same, and no definitive record of it can exist. Furthermore, anyone who ventures to declare in a public forum that “Inuksuit” was one of the most rapturous experiences of his listening life—that is how I felt, and I wasn’t the only one—might be suspected of harboring hippie-dippie tendencies. The work is not explicitly political, nor is it the formal expression of an individual sensibility, although John Luther Adams certainly deserved the ecstatic and prolonged ovation that greeted him when he acknowledged the crowd from the center of the Drill Hall. In the end, several young couples seemed to deliver the most incisive commentary when, amid the obliterating tidal wave of sound, they began making out.

As I learned the other day from WKCR-FM’sPhil Schaap, who’s been encouraging folks to send this guy a birthday card (I mailed mine yesterday), the oldest performing jazz musician, trumpeter Lionel Ferbos, who plays at New Orleans’ Palm Court Jazz Cafe, turns 100 on July 17th. Birthday greetings can be mailed (remember mail?) to 5543 Press Dr., New Orleans, LA 70126.

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Thu, 09 Jun 2011 09:10:16 +0000musicclipofthedayhttps://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/06/09/thursday-6911/kaleidoscopic, adj. 1. changing form, pattern, color, etc., in a manner suggesting a kaleidoscope. 2. continually shifting from one set of relations to another. E.g., the music of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

]]>https://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/06/01/wednesday-6111/
Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:15:46 +0000musicclipofthedayhttps://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/06/01/wednesday-6111/One sign of a great performance—no matter what the genre—is that you find yourself on the edge of your seat, leaning forward, trying to get closer.

Orutu player and singer, percussionist, live, Kenya (Homa Bey), 1996

]]>https://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/05/19/friday-may-20-2011/
Fri, 20 May 2011 04:59:07 +0000musicclipofthedayhttps://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/05/19/friday-may-20-2011/Who else (besides, of course, Bob Dylan) has played so many different roles so brilliantly?

Listen to stuff long enough and it changes—or you do, anyway. Once I might have faulted this for being repetitive. But that’s a bit like faulting roast beef for being meat. Of course it’s repetitive. That’s part of what makes it soar.

“It’s a fascinating time for Haitian music,” said Ned Sublette, author of “The World that Made New Orleans.” “Haitians voted for the music ticket [electing kompa singer Michel Martelly president]. You cannot deny the importance of communication through music in Haiti. And this is something New Orleanians know well.”

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Wed, 11 May 2011 07:46:39 +0000musicclipofthedayhttps://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/05/11/wedenesday-51111/scenes from New Orleansan occasional series

. . . [Robert Mugabe’s] regime . . . has lost all its moral bearings, a gang of thieves and murderers bent on holding power at any cost. The book draws to a close with the testimony of Emmanuel Chiroto, a Harare opposition leader whose campaign for mayor has brought down the wrath of Mugabe’s goons. Even as he is celebrating his victory, members of the youth militia set his house on fire and abduct his wife, Abigail, and 4-year-old son. The boy is released, but Abigail’s swollen and battered corpse is found in the morgue. “This is my lovely wife,” Chiroto tells Godwin, holding up a cellphone image of Abigail in her wedding dress. “And they killed her.” Three years after his defeat at the polls, Mugabe still clings to power in his ruined nation. But Godwin’s intrepid reportage has at least given voice to some of his victims.

A great brass band and a great mix have something in common. You can tell a great mix—as we used to say at Alligator Records—even from the next room. And you can tell a great brass band even from the next block.

According to the guidebook, Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, but in our experience its people seemed confident and proud of their culture in this 50th anniversary of independence from French colonial rule. Deep red dust carpets the country, kicked up by the mopeds that crisscross the rutted ground and buy markets lining nearly every street. Yet through the coating of dust the people always look impeccably elegant.

***

In Burkina, the sun drops away at 7 p.m. sharp. When we returned for the concert, we saw scores of parked mopeds glistening under the full moon., and hundreds of people queuing outside the high crumbling walls enclosing the open air theatre. Inside, beyond the light cast rom the state, a huge crowd bustled quietly in the darkness otherwise shrouding the vast auditorium. Families with children of all ages filled the wooden benches, and here too traders plied bronze jewellery and leather goods around the perimeter.

I admire a radio station where you can’t be certain when you first tune in—as happened to me yesterday afternoon, while working, when I turned on WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)—whether they’re playing a recording or having technical difficulties.

]]>https://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/02/02/wednesday-2211/
Wed, 02 Feb 2011 22:50:07 +0000musicclipofthedayhttps://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/02/02/wednesday-2211/How many musicians are so at home, and give so much pleasure,
in so many styles?

]]>https://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/01/15/saturday-11511/
Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:47:04 +0000musicclipofthedayhttps://musicclipoftheday.com/2011/01/15/saturday-11511/Some music conjures a world so benign you don’t want to leave.